The personal blog of Reyn Bowman, a Durham NC resident, 40-year veteran of community-destination marketing and still an explorer in community sense-of-place. Opinions expressed here are those of the author.

Friday, August 28, 2015

The Future of Analytics

With history and law in my educational background, few people, including me, would have predicted back in 1981 that I would become one of the first in my career of community destination marketing to embrace analytics.

Although I took statistics, in essence history is a form of analytical thinking. But back in 1972 when I earned a degree in that major it was less likely to involve data.

Law school certainly teaches critical thinking but not open-mindedness.

“But as soon as we want to reach a conclusion, or as soon as we get emotional, we get angry and open-minded thinking shuts down and we become lawyers.”

Researchers know today that the natural talent for analytics that I began to tap into in the early 1980s is a competitive advantage that was central to the DMOs I led being able to quickly leapfrog more established competitors.

Unfortunately, other than various aspects, I was never really able to teach it to others on staff before I retired at the end of 2009, with the exception of my eventual successor.

Even so, she had an innate talent for analytics. You can teach skills but not talents, especially not nuance.

Rare even among those now formally trained in analytics is the ability or talent to see nuanced patterns and then apply them strategically to an objective.

Research conducted by MIT’s Sloan Management Review and SAS calculates that only 12% of organizations overall have this ability.

More than a third are “analytically challenged” and more than half are “analytic practitioners” that employ it primarily for operations, sometimes predictively, although that is not their focus.

So one-in-eight of these organizations are “analytic innovators” which are found to be seven times as likely to employ analytics predictively and six times more likely to deploy it prescriptively.